Ernie's Ark: The Abbott Falls Stories

by Monica Wood

Overview

The bestselling author of The One-in-a-Million Boy has crafted a story collection that "illuminates the grace in the average and everyday" of a small town (San Francisco Chronicle).
In ten interlinking stories, the town of Abbot Falls reacts as Ernie Whitten, pipefitter, builds a giant ark in his backyard. Ernie was weeks away from a pension-secured retirement when the union went on strike. Now his wife Marie is ill. Struck with sudden inspiration, Ernie builds the ark as a work of art for his wife to see from the window; a vessel to carry them both away; or a plea for God to spare Marie, come hell or high water.
As the ark takes shape, the rest of the town carries on. There's Dan Little, a building-code enforcer who comes to fine Ernie for the ark and makes a significant discovery about himself; Francine Love, a precocious thirteen-year-old who longs to be a part of the family-like world of the union workers; and Atlantic Pulp & Paper CEO Henry John McCoy, an impatient man wearily determined to be a good father to his twenty-six-year-old daughter. The people of Abbott Falls will try their best to hold a community together, against the fiercest of odds . . .
Few writers can capture the extraordinary within seemingly ordinary lives as does Monica Wood. An unforgettable tapestry of love, loneliness—and neighbors.
"Like Elizabeth Strout, her fellow chronicler of small-town Maine life, Monica Wood imbues her characters with the complexity and humanity of real people. Ernie's Ark is as true as life." ?Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781567926743
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	08/27/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	154
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Monica Wood is a novelist, memoirist, and playwright. Her most recent novel, The One-in-a-Million Boy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has been published in 22 languages in 30 countries and won the 2017 Nautilus Award (Gold) and the New England Society Book Award. She is also the author of When We Were the Kennedys (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), an Oprah magazine summer-reading pick and winner of both the May Sarton Memoir Award and the 2016 Maine Literary Award. Ernie's Ark was excerpted on NPR's "Selected Shorts" and selected by several towns and cities as their "One Book, One Community" read.

Read an Excerpt

Ernie Whitten, pipefitter

Ernie was an angry man. He felt his anger as something apart from him, like an urn of water balanced on his head, a precarious weight that affected his gait, the set of his shoulders, his willingness to move through a crowd. He was angry at the melon-faced CEO from New York City who had forced a strike in a paper mill all the way up in Maine—a decision made, Ernie was sure, in that fancy restaurant atop the World Trade Center where Ernie had taken his wife, Marie, for their forty-fifth wedding anniversary last winter, another season, another life. Every Thursday as he stood in line at Manpower Services to wait for his unemployment check he thought of that jelly-assed CEO—Henry John McCoy, with his parted blond hair—yucking it up at a table laid out in bleached linen and phony silver, figuring out all the ways he could cut a man off at the knees three weeks before retirement.

Oh, yes, he was angry. At the deadbeats and no-accounts who stood in line with him: the Davis boy, who couldn’t look a man in the eye; the Shelton girl, with hair dyed so bright you could light a match on her ponytail. There were others in line—millwrights and tinsmiths and machine tenders whose years and labor had added up to a puff of air—but he couldn’t bear to look at them, so he reserved his livid stare for the people in line who least resembled himself.

He was angry at the kids from Broad Street who cut through his yard on their dirt bikes day after day, leaving moats of mud through the flowery back lawn Marie had sprinkled a season ago with Meadow-in-a-Can. He was angry with the police department, who didn’t give a hoot about Marie’s wrecked grass. He’d even tried city hall, where an overpaid blowhard, whose uncle had worked beside Ernie nineteen years ago on the Number Five, had all but laughed in his face.

When he arrived at the hospital after collecting his weekly check, Marie was being bathed by a teenaged orderly. He had seen his wife in all manner of undress over the years, yet it filled him with shame to observe the yellow hospital sponge applied to her diminishing body by a uniformed kid who was younger than their only grandchild. He went to the lobby to wait, picking up a newspaper from among the litter of magazines.

It was some sort of city weekly, filled with mean political cartoons and smug picture captions fashioned to embarrass the President, but it had a separate section on the arts, Marie’s favorite subject. She had dozens of coffee-table books stowed in her sewing room, and their house was filled with framed prints of strange objects—melted watches and spent shoelaces and sad, deserted diners—that he never liked but had nonetheless come to think of as old friends. He had never known her to miss a Community Concert or an exhibit at the library where she had worked three days a week since she was eighteen; every Sunday of their married life, Ernie had brought in the paper, laid it on the kitchen table, and fished out the arts section to put next to Marie’s coffee cup.

The weekly was printed on dirty newsprint—paper from out of state, he surmised. He scanned the cheap, see-through pages, fixing on an announcement for an installation competition, whatever that was. The winning entry would be displayed to the public at the college. Pictured was last year’s winner, a tangle of pipes and sheet metal that looked as if somebody had hauled a miniature version of the Number Five machine out of the mill, twisted it into a thousand ugly pieces, then left it to weather through five hundred hailstorms. Not that it would matter now if somebody did. The Burden of Life, this installation was called, by an artist who most likely hadn’t yet moved out of his parents’ house. He thought Marie would like it, though—she had always been a woman who understood people’s intentions—so he removed the picture with his jackknife and tucked it into his shirt pocket. Then he faltered his way back up the hall and into her room, where she was sitting up, weak and clean.

Editorial Reviews

In this extraordinary book, Monica Wood plumbs the depths of the human soul with a perceptive eye and a generous heart. Ernie’s Ark tells the story of a quixotic quest born of grief and longing and its reverberations throughout a small Maine mill town. As its inhabitants—husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and enemies—take stock of themselves and each other, their relationships deepen and expand in unexpected ways. Each of them carries hidden passions and quiet griefs, long-held resentments and unrequited dreams. Like Elizabeth Strout, her fellow chronicler of small-town Maine life, Wood imbues her characters with the complexity and humanity of real people. Ernie’s Ark is as true as life.”—Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train

“Each story can easily stand alone, yet every new one contains an object or memory we’ve seen in a previous story, usually from another perspective. The overall effect is one of panorama, the sense that though we haven’t met everyone in Abbott Falls, we’ve cast a good long glance at the range of hopes and heartaches the town contains.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Ernie’s Ark [contains] the subtly disguised idea that anger, loss, and desperation are related and must be confronted...The loving character portraits that form her stories help us understand not only the people of Maine but also the human condition...Though Wood admires the people with whom she shares Maine, she neither patronizes nor reveres them. They regret, they love, they rally around each other, they hope. Abbott Falls is not such a bad place to live.”—The Boston Globe

“Ernie’s Ark ultimately asks what our response to sorrow says about us. Looming like a silent smokestack is Abbott Falls itself, the tragedy each of the characters share. Wood illuminates the grace in the average and every day, the miracles that lie within the ordinary life….”—San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher